"Oh, like the downtown street acronym."

Here is what I'm working on now.

I haven't committed myself to drawing in any capacity since a few of the Lobster Manor show posters, and this is way bigger than that. This is kind of huge and terrifying.

". . . but those first two novels were just so. . . so. . . icky."

Tonight I had a free ticket to see Jonathan Franzen, whom Time Magazine calls the "Great American Novelist" or whatever, speak at Benaroya Hall.

He was smart and funny and very human, talking about the necessity of personal growth to continued relevance, the difficulty of humanity in literary fiction and things like that. I decided to take it as a good thing that many of the things one of the most successful/respected modern american writers said resonated, rather than dwell on *which* particular parts of the talk were hitting home and why.

(i mean, i noted those in the graham-needs-a-life-coach section, not graham-is-a-writer section, though the two are not separate)

also: knew I would be an Uncle by early next year. Now I know I will have a Nephew.

Fire Ant Fire Dance

Back in my days with the fire ants I was a ravager.
The bodies of crickets, the bodies of mice, bodies of
other, weaker ants. We had rituals for these things,
songs and chants and traffic through our underground mazes
was its own rhythm, its own catharsis.
Things were heavy often, the weight of a load nearly crushing
my thorax but I only ever had one at a time and I knew which
direction to walk with it. Through grains of sand that twitched
my antennae. Clods of dirt as big as my head. We owned the yard.
The blades of grass. Swarmed rocks until no grey stone left,
just the thousands of us, in our glory.
Then the child came, big and fat and stupid with hard treaded
feet, stomped our mounds. The elders fled. Tunnels
collapsed, the temple destroyed and the queens crushed under
relentless stamping.

But you should see what we did to that kid's leg.